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Divorcee Blasts 'Scrooge' Ex-Husband In Online Column

It’s not unusual to hear about a divorcee whose life quality improved drastically after their divorce. What is unusual, though, is when that divorcee pens a column in a national newspaper blasting their former spouse. 52-year-old Jacquie Pelc did just that yesterday.

Pelc wrote for MailOnline that she was married to an “original scrooge” named Stanley for 17 years. This year will be her first holiday season without him in almost two decades. She says the relief she feels hit her particularly hard during a recent holiday shopping trip.

“This Christmas will be the first one I’ve hosted as a single woman — my husband Stanley, 53, and I are divorcing — so you’d expect it to be a sad time,” she says. “But in that moment, as I waited to buy the strings of outdoor lights that Stanley always refused to have, I felt a buzz about the season I’d long forgotten.”

She says her marriage was full of problems, but they always seemed to be the most unbearable around the holidays. She wanted to put up lights, he refused to. She wanted to give their children a few nice gifts, he said they were too expensive. She wanted bake a homemade cake, he said it was cheaper to buy one from the store.

“One year,” she says, “he agreed to buy them a Nintendo Wii console, but refused to get the sports game they wanted to go with it. Any parent can imagine how devastating that was for two boys on Christmas Day.”

In years past, Pelc writes, Christmas day was a tension-filled event in which she and her sons tried to pry Stanley off the couch. Not so this year.

“Instead, the boys and I will toast Christmas Day with real champagne — a special treat for them,” she writes. “We’ll switch the TV off and play games instead — the boys adore Monopoly. And in the evening we have invited friends and family round for tea and home-made cake. In hindsight, I see that for years I’d dreaded Christmas — but deluded myself it was a special family time.”

She says her decision to divorce her husband is the best gift she could’ve given herself.

“As for me, the best Christmas present is the one I gave myself nearly two years ago — the courage to leave my loveless marriage,” she concludes.

What would be really great is if MailOnline would let ol’ Stanley share his side of things in a column of his own. Something tells me we’d get a very different story.